In order to motivate and coordinate the acts of millions of people over more than a generation, long range goals have to achieve a legitimacy. Such legitimate shared goals ought to be considered a vision, and the legitimacy of the vision ought to be understood to rest on a rational faith. A fact finding commission must seek "evidence of things unseen", since the future can only exist in vision, tangible reality only emerges through goal directed effort by groups of human beings. We live then in a time when the human ability to envision a future, emerges as our most important tool for the survival of the present form of American Society.
We are fortunate that we are about to install a national leader who is a gifted visionary, who possess exceptional talents for identifying viable collective goals, sharing a contagious vision of those goals, and implementing routes to the realization of those goals.
I assume that a figure of Barack Obama's astuteness would wish for a "fact finding commission" to sort out competing visions of the future. The function of the blue ribbon fact finders would be both to separate viable visions that will bring the American people to where they want to be from vision that are impractical or which would be deemed to yield unsatisfactory results.
Above all else the blue ribbon fact finders must not simply identify a vision but must begin the contagion process without which the vision will not be realized. They must also provide political leadership with political cover. There will be no doubt political opposition to the vision and the steps that will be taken to realize it. The first line of defense will be, "this is what the experts recommend". Because they are on the front line and ultimately exemplars, members of the blue ribbon commission must be selected for their courage, as well as their intelligence, capacity for rational thought, and vision. They will be exemplars for a nation and for the world, because it is anticipated that they will set a path on which all people will be traveling for the next 40 years.
It would be very nice to find a group of Richard Feynmans to set on the blue ribbon commission, people who are gifted visionaries, who have great respect for facts, and who have to the ability to ferret out the critical facts.
We are fortunate that we are about to install a national leader who is a gifted visionary, who possess exceptional talents for identifying viable collective goals, sharing a contagious vision of those goals, and implementing routes to the realization of those goals.
I assume that a figure of Barack Obama's astuteness would wish for a "fact finding commission" to sort out competing visions of the future. The function of the blue ribbon fact finders would be both to separate viable visions that will bring the American people to where they want to be from vision that are impractical or which would be deemed to yield unsatisfactory results.
Above all else the blue ribbon fact finders must not simply identify a vision but must begin the contagion process without which the vision will not be realized. They must also provide political leadership with political cover. There will be no doubt political opposition to the vision and the steps that will be taken to realize it. The first line of defense will be, "this is what the experts recommend". Because they are on the front line and ultimately exemplars, members of the blue ribbon commission must be selected for their courage, as well as their intelligence, capacity for rational thought, and vision. They will be exemplars for a nation and for the world, because it is anticipated that they will set a path on which all people will be traveling for the next 40 years.
It would be very nice to find a group of Richard Feynmans to set on the blue ribbon commission, people who are gifted visionaries, who have great respect for facts, and who have to the ability to ferret out the critical facts.
I don't know how to do this on a small scale in a practical way, but I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can't we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements---and by little, I mean little. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting---if they could be made to be more complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features. . . .
But there is plenty of room to make them smaller. There is nothing that I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now. In fact, there may be certain advantages.
This then is a man of courage, intelligence, discernment and vision.
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